1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to spoken dialog systems and more specifically to approximating a region, dialect, or accent of a speaker.
2. Introduction
Interactive voice response (IVR) systems encounter many different regional and national languages, dialects, accents, vocabularies, and other language variations. The differences between these variations can be vast. Language models can be used to enhance understanding of various languages, but the IVR system does not know in advance which language model to apply. One approach to this problem is to analyze user speech on the fly and determine which language model fits. However, the problem with this approach is that the user speech is not recognized efficiently during the initial analysis step and may be recognized incorrectly.
Another approach to this problem is to ask the user to indicate language preferences, but that introduces an additional iteration with the user which slows down the interaction and may seem intrusive or imposing to some users. Yet another approach is to require users to create a user profile that indicates language preferences. However, this approach has the shortcoming of requiring users to create a profile, which some users resist, and does not work in settings where user profiles are not expected or not feasible.